Costa Rican fans seem divided between the red and black of the Liga
Deportiva Alajuelense and the purple of Deportivo Saprissa. Compared to
these teams, Brujas is a baby. It was founded in 2004. Alajuela dates
to 1919 and Saprissa to 1935. Brujas is but one of 12 first division
teams in Costa Rica, and it is the youngest.

The management of the Brujas wants to enhance the team image, and they
want to do so in a socially responsible way, they said this week. In a
meeting Tuesday they announced several projects that will benefit the
poor neighborhoods of the Escazú canton.

Although the name Escazú has become synonymous with a North
American enclave, there are still many poor areas in the canton, which
is west of San José. The word brujas, of course, means witches
and relates to the long tradition of practitioners of the black arts
living in Escazú since Colonial times.

Brujas wants to adopt an identity that represents the western part of
the Provincia de San José, regardless of social and economic
situations, said Eladio Villata, a board member.

The professional team is seeking municipal support to develop a home
stadium and a team training and sports field, said the team executives.
They will share these facilities with youngsters for not completely
unselfish reasons: They are

Logo
of Escazú
professional
soccer football
team

seeking the superstars of tomorrow. The team plays home games now at
Estadio Nacional in Parque La Sabana.

At the session, held in the Hotel Real Continental, Minor Vargas, an
investor and personality in the national and international sports
industry was introduced as the team's new president.

The vision of the project is to make soccer a family event and to bring
the team recognition to the young population of the Escazú areas
where
there are many teens at risk from drug addiction and alcohol, team
executives said.

Villata is developing a minor league that also will have a recreational
soccer dimension that will capture fans at an early age.

A lot is still to be done, including making some kind of arrangement
with the municipality before the positive social and economic impact
becomes a reality, said Stefano Sgarlatta, one of the major
stockholders.

Nation will mark
centennial of birth of José Figueres Ferrer

By the A.M. Costa Rica staff

Monday is the 100th birthday of José Figueres Ferrer, the major
figure in 20th century Costa Rican history.

He was the man who led the rebels in the 1948 civil war, ousted
President Teodoro Picado Michalski and others loyal to Rafael
Ángel Calderón Guardia and abolished the Costa Rican army.

He was president of Costa Rica three times and his

family continues to have
strong political influence. He was the final
architect of the state of rights in which Costa Ricans live today.
Figueres died in 1990.

The Asamblea Legislative voted Wednesday to mark the birthday during
its session Monday.

The Centro Cultural e Histórico José Figueres Ferrer in
San Ramón de
Alajuela, the birthplace of Figueres, will be finishing up a year-long
series of events marking the birthday.

Just a reminder to Mr. Call
that the conventional arms treaty (October at the U.N.) will not
restrict the U.S. military in its own acquistion and deployment of
weapons — including land mines.

It would stop countries (and their arms dealers) from legally suppling
weapons to outlaw groups and nations that are specified by the U.N.
China, for instance, currently supplies some really nasty regimes,
including North Korea and Sudan.

The (Arab) Sundanese government is right now conducting a war of
genocide against its own (black) citizens. The U.S. was the first to
recoqnize this slaughter, and the U.N., it seems, is finally ready to
use
force to stop it.

Anyway, right now China legally supplies these murderers. The treaty
would change this. In being against the treaty, the current U.S.
administration wants zero restrictions on being able to arm any group
it wants.

I think most Americans would agree some restraint on their government
wouldn’t be a bad idea, that like any good government it should be
really cautious about who it arms, and should respect what the
international community thinks.

If the U.S. refuses to join the treaty, Russia, China and the other bad
guys will simply say “why should we?” And as a good ex-soldier,
Mr. Call rightly wants good weapons to protect his troops. He would
also agree that the supply of these same good weapons should be
controlled, and not be in the hands of the enemy to be used against him
and his buddies.

Maybe this issue does seem complicated, and less than black and white.
It can also take patience, understanding, a bit of compromise and a lot
of small steps by a lot of decent people, to make the world a better
and safer place.

Gordon Martin

Full freedom of speech
not necessarily good thing

Dear A.M. Costa Rica:

I was appalled by your printing of that U.S. soldier’s retarded letter
in Tuesday’s edition, highlighting the use of his favourite type of
landmine and printing his moronic statement that they are a
non-aggressive weapon. As a former U.N. employee, having spent
considerable time in Iraq (after the second time the States bombed the
living daylights out of tens of thousands of innocent civilians), I
spent many nights in U.N. tented refugee camps listening to the dull
thuds of children mistakenly walking over said devices, being turned to
jelly.

And what about the thousands of unexploded devices that the U.S.
refused to clean up that it littered Laos with during the Vietnam war?
A country that was not even involved in the conflict, and who’s only
transgression was to be geographically next to Vietnam? Scores of
people today are still being turned into human ketchup by the ignorant
Nazi war machine of the States, which even today still refuses to clean
up its own mess. A War on Terror, eh?

Take a second to Google “School of the Americas” (or the new
user-friendly name “Fort Benning”) and check up on http://www.soaw.org/
to read all about the main American terrorist training camp located
right in the middle of the good ole’ U.S. of A., which trains dictators
and soldiers (mainly from Latin America alas) how to interrogate,
torture and terrorise civilians. The majority from countries in which
the U.S. has vested sweat-shop labour camp interests. Hmmmm, are we
starting to get the picture yet people?

You will never reverse-brainwash idiots like this who have been spoon
fed rhetoric since birth, but as a paper based in one of the few
army-sane countries in the world, you disappoint me enormously by
printing this moronic drivel.

As has been shown recently (take the pope’s comments and the ensuing
backlash, for example), complete freedom of speech is not necessarily a
good thing. If the right to spout (and print) rubbish had some limiting
intelligence applied to it, then internet bomb recipes would never have
been so easily accessible to lunatics like Timothy McVeigh and the more
recent crazies in the U.K.

Idiots should be seen and not heard, and you should not encourage these
blood-crazy dullards to voice their ignorant and brainwashed
opinions.
Anywhere.

Stephen Renton
London

Situations at hospitals
elaborated in detail

Dear A.M. Costa Rica:

In regard to the article on A.M Costa Rica Wednesday, we at
Veterans Care International, serving Hospital CIMA San José
would like to make a few clarifications.

Mr. Sven Johnson and Norieth Guillén, both members of Veterans
Care International, attended the Tricare and FMP seminar in Panama City
on Sept. 11.

The statements made by Clinica Biblica regarding drastically lowered
reimbursment policies by Tricare and the FMP were not presented by any
member of the Tricare and FMP management team.

Col. Debra Franco, director of Tricare Latin America and Canada,
explained that a fee schedule for Panama and Costa Rica had been under
study for several months and a tentative schedule had been considered,
but had been put on an indefinite hold because it was found to be too
low for realistic implementation.

Col. Franco said that if a schedule is eventually adopted that it would
most probably be based on pricing in Puerto Rico or Miami. Until that
time Tricare and FMP will continue to pay on an “as billed” using basic
Medicare standards.

Hospital CIMA will continue to provide services for all veterans
(disabled and retirees and their families) requiring no up-front
payments and Veterans Care International will continue to provide
professional assistance to all veterans along with the American Legion
Post 16 service officer.

Jim Young
Veterans Care International
Hospital CIMA

EDITOR’S NOTE: Clinica Biblica now requires veterans, retirees
and dependents to pay for medical treatment themselves and seek
reimbursement from Tricare. The dispute is over how much the U.S.
medical program will pay for medical procedures.

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The tourism minister wants no part of plans to set up promotional
agencies in Guanacaste and in Limón.

In fact, the tourism minister, former lawmaker Carlos Ricardo
Benavides, said he would rather set up his own eight regional offices
with five employees each.

Benavides said last week that the twin proposals in the Asamblea
Legislativa would weaken his Instituto Costarricense de Turismo.

The measure came up for a vote Wednesday in the Comisión con
Potestad Legislativa Plena Segunda. Members affiliated with the Partido
Acción Ciudadana wanted to postpone action on the
measures, a move that might have meant killing them. The move failed.
Both Guanacaste and the Provincia de Limón heavily supported
Óscar Arias Sánchez in the last presidential election and
led to his victory over the Partido Acción Ciudadana
candidate.

Tourism operators on both coasts want the
independent promotional agencies to focus on their
own areas.

The tourism institute has
been weak in the
promotional department. A $840,000 Web page has generated few
reservations. The page has a traffic ranking of 157,752 according to
Alexa, the Amazon.Com company that provides such services. It has been
as low as 228,254. By comparison, The Tico Times today is 114,092, A.M.
Costa
Rica is 43,806. and La Nación is 9,375. Yahoo is the No. 1
most
visited site and MSN is No. 2.

The tourism institute also spent $4.5 million ostensibly to promote the
country during the World Cup soccer championships, but officials
admitted that they had no idea on how to measure their response.

Benavides also told lawmakers in his visit last week he did not want
any competition with the tourism institute. The institute
collects a
tax on every tourism hotel bill and other tourist expenditures.

Intel
hooks up remote Amazon town with wireless Internet

Special to
A.M. Costa Rica

In one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth, the Amazon, Intel
Corp. has created a wireless, high-speed Internet network for residents
to access vast resources of medical, educational and commercial
knowledge through computers. The project is part of the Intel World
Ahead Program, an initiative in which Intel plans to invest more than
$1 billion over the next five years to accelerate access to computers,
the Internet and technology for people in developing communities.

The digital transformation of Parintins, a town on an island in the
Amazon River, is expected to improve the healthcare and education of
its 114,000 residents and advance the lives of future generations.

“Technology has expanded what is possible in Parintins,” said Intel
Chairman Craig Barrett at a dedication ceremony Wednesday in the Amazon
rain forest. “It is now a place where wireless broadband links to the
Internet bring the expertise of specialists, sophisticated medical
imaging and the world’s libraries to a community reachable only by
airplane or boat.”

Working with the Brazilian government and business and education
officials, Intel and its collaborators installed a state-of-the-art
WiMAX network for a primary healthcare center, two public schools, a
community center and Amazon University. Intel also donated and
installed telemedicine equipment at the health center and computer labs
at the two schools where students and teachers can regularly connect to
the outside world for the first time.

“We’ve been blessed with this project,” said Parintins Mayor Frank Bi
Garcia. “We’re really isolated and don’t have the conditions to
receive the
Internet with cables. So we’re receiving it wireless, from antennas,
from satellites – access to wireless Internet is a great pleasure for
us. This project will prepare this generation for the future.”

Intel led the effort in the island city on the Amazon River with
support from Cisco, CpqD, Embratel, Proxim and the Bradesco Foundation,
as well as Amazonas State University, Amazonas Federal University and
São Paulo University.

Intel aims to extend wireless PC access to
millions of citizens in Latin America and train more than a million
teachers about the effective use of technology in the classroom. In
Parintins, Intel has already trained 24 teachers through its education
initiatives. The Intel Teach Program teaches teachers how to use
technology to improve the way students learn. The Intel Learn Program
provides job-readiness skills to underprivileged students between the
ages of 10 and 18.

“The student, from the moment he gets in touch with other people, other
cultures, with other information beyond the borders of his country, he
gets a lot of benefits,” said Goncala Do Nacimento Pinto Filha, a fifth
grade teacher in Parintins. “The community can keep up with evolution.
It can feel equal in social terms as well.”

As part of Parintins’ digital makeover, Amazon University is starting a
telemedicine program developed jointly with the medical school of Sao
Paulo University. The new capabilities – including real-time, video
interaction between specialists and patients hundreds of miles apart –
give the town’s 32 doctors faster and greater access to the latest
medical data or second opinions.

“Telemedicine for us is like a new
weapon,
a weapon from the future,” said Dr. Gregorz Maciejewski, municipal
secretary of health in Parintins.

Doctors say telemedicine will also help in preventing the spread of
such diseases as AIDS and leprosy.

The solution in the Amazon is to be followed by others planned by Intel
for isolated communities in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, where
electricity and telecommunications are unreliable or antiquated and
transportation is difficult.

The wireless infrastructure includes short-range Wi-Fi radio
transmissions and WiMAX, which has an extended transmitting range of up
to 30 miles. WiMAX is designed to be a less costly and more efficient
way to build wireless computing and communications networks for
broadband access. Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has facilities in Costas Rica.

The United States and President George Bush have come in for harsh
criticism during a day of sharply-worded speeches at the annual U.N.
General Assembly opening. Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez got
personal, calling Bush "the devil himself."

Chavez burnished his reputation as one of Washington's severest
populist critics Wednesday. To rousing applause in the U.N. General
Assembly hall, he described the United States as a "hegemonistic power"
intent on world domination, and a "threat to the survival of the human
race."

Chavez had even stronger words for President Bush. The leftist leader
called the president "the devil," and said Bush had left a smell of
sulfur in the chamber from his appearance the previous day.

"Yesterday, the devil came here, right here, and it smells of sulfur
still today," said Chavez. "Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from
this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom
I refer as the devil, came here talking as if he owned the world."

There were no senior U.S. officials in the chamber at the time, but
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice later told reporters she would not
dignify Chavez's comments with a reply. Washington's combative U.N.
Ambassador John Bolton, however, described the Venezualan's speech as a
"comic strip approach to international affairs."

Chavez also criticized Pope Benedict XVI Wednesday, saying he found the
pontiff's recent remarks about Islam and holy war "worrisome".

Cuba's delegate at the Assembly session, Esteban Lazo Hernández
echoed many of Chavez's criticisms of the United States. Lazo described
the U.S. embargo of his country as a criminal policy.

"The Bush administration has stepped up its brutally hostile

methods against Cuba," said Lazo. "With
new economic sanctions that further intensify what is already the
longest blockade human history has known."

The annual assembly debate
also provided a forum for a spat between Asian neighbors Afghanistan
and Pakistan.
Opening Wednesday's session, Afghan President Hamid Karzai decried the
current surge of violence in his country which he said is the worst
since U.S. forces overthrew the Taliban in 2001. He did not mention
Pakistan by name, but said outsiders are responsible.

"We must look beyond Afghanistan to the sources of terrorism," said
Hamid Karzai. "We must destroy terrorist sanctuaries beyond
Afghanistan, dismantle the elaborate networks in the region that
recruit, indoctrinate, train, finance, arm and deploy terrorists."

A short time later, Pakistani
President
Pervez Musharraf rejected Karzai's charge. Speaking to a U.N. news
conference, Musharraf said Pakistan is doing more than Afghanistan to
fight terrorists in the rugged border region. He challenged Karzai to
take action against Taliban commander Mullah Omar, whom, he said, is in
southern Afghanistan.

"Instead of this blame game that goes on, they must realize what is the
environment, he must realize what is the correct environment, and take
action accordingly in Afghanistan," said Pervez Musharraf. "The problem
lies in Afghanistan and that is creating problems in Pakistan."

The commander of U.S. forces in the region, Gen. John Abizaid,
expressed concern this week about renewed Taliban military activity
along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.

The General Assembly debate Wednesday also included addresses by the
leaders of Italy, Chile, Montenegro and Qatar, as well as Israel's
foreign minister.

Thursday's schedule includes the leaders of Lebanon,
Serbia and Colombia, along with senior officials from Russia, Japan and
South Korea.

Leftist
candidate moves up into tie for the lead in presidential race in Ecuador

By the A.M.
Costa Rica staff

A new public opinion poll shows that a leftist economist seeking to
become Ecuador's next president is tied with his main rival, a former
vice president.

A poll released by Cedatos Gallup Tuesday shows that Rafael Correa has
gained two points to hold 19 percent of voter support ahead of the Oct.
15 presidential election. The former economy minister has worried
foreign investors with a proposal to restructure Ecuador's foreign debt
payments.

He is slightly behind Leon
Roldos, a
left-leaning former

vice president who dropped two points to
20 percent
in the opinion poll. Statistically they have the same support.

Conservative Cynthia Viteri is in third, with 13 percent support in the
poll. Almost half of all voters remain undecided.

If no candidate wins 50 percent of the ballot, a run-off will be held
between the two top candidates in November.

The poll reflects the opinions of 3,342 people surveyed from Friday to
Sunday. The margin of error is 3 points in predicting the outcome if the vote were held last week.

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